I have no dog in this fight, just responding that there has been recent discussion that Amir at ASR in his Bonn N8 test isn’t even using the appropriate equipment to support what we’re discussing here.
That’s possible, but at least he provides measurements. We have not seen any measurements that would support the claim that switches or cables do make an audible difference. So until we see those, we can only work with what is available…
4 Likes
That I would agree with, sir. However, I’m not certain how helpful or even not helpful providing measurements made outside the realm of expertise we’re all attempting to find answers to could be considered relevant. I’d never dismiss measurements so long as they’re comparing like for like, or within the proper scope.
I’m just the messenger. I have an EE8 arriving in 2 days. Trying to be open minded 
3 Likes
That was funny.
2 Likes
I am so looking forward to this 
HMV perhaps?
What it is HMV?
I got it . 
Yes, I found it through google.
1 Like
I’ve also have very little skin in this game. I bought a new Super WiFi router,
Asus RT-AX88u it has 8 ports. Synology NAS via AQ Vodka to router. My Auralic Aries G1 connected by 5ghz WIFi as Recommended by Auralic nothing else in the house on 5ghz band. Works great I’ve had it streaming internet Radio for hours and hours on end no dropouts.
Even if we can say that all the data packets arrived at a pre-DAC checkpoint and were reassembled in the correct order, is it still possible that the gaps between data packets could be altered in transit in a way that effects SQ in some combinations of cabling and equipment?
Yes… specifically it was layer 2 frames… but I did find on the first gen streamers, that different UPnP servers sounded different… so curious I examined the data sent… it was effectively identical… however the differences was the timing constancy between the frames during bursts of frames sent from server to streamer. The more consistent the inter frame timing, to my ears the preferable the resultant audio.
This however ceased to be relevant with the new streamer architecture… I could hear no meaningful difference.
BTW on the home LAN and even cloud streaming I never saw incidents of frames or packets respectively coming out of order.
However with cloud streaming, on the first gen streamers the resultant frames had quite a variance of inter frame timing… therefore media proxies such as BubbleUPnP were great for SQ with Tidal, as they reinforced a more consistent interframe timing between proxy and streamer and that was before even attempting transcoding.
I guess this reinforces to some extent that with bit streams, it’s not about 1s and 0s… but it’s about 1s, 0s and t.
3 Likes
I now have ND5XS2/555DR, DC1, nDAC - which sounds great.
(I haven’t had a chance to measure 
it yet to confirm whether the improvement in SQ is real!)
But I’ve got an ee8 coming tomorrow.
Maybe the EE will not make an audible difference to the separated streamer and dac.
But quite a few of those on here who liked the effect of the EE do have separated streamer and dac, iirc.
4 Likes
A sample of one is an unreliable result. Give me the results from a group of say ten participants and that would be more statistically valid.
The only statistic that matters is the owner. I don’t need a focus group to confirm BJC cables sound better in my system than the Audioquest cables they replaced.
2 Likes
No indeed you don’t
But if you want to prove it to someone else (which of course you’ve no need to), but if you do want to be able to assert that there is a difference, proof needs more than anecdotal evidence.
2 Likes
Actually anecdotal is all it needs to be. The notion I need statistically relevant evidence to assert my aforementioned claims is pretty silly.
2 Likes